They will all be invited to Washington, D.C. in March to present their work and meet with scientists. The 40 finalists are competing for more than $1.25M in awards and scholarships. The top winner will receive $100,000 from the Intel Foundation.

Last year, Danville's Evan O'Dorney won the whole competition. His mathematics project compared two ways to estimate the square root of an integer.

The Intel Science Talent Search is the most prestigious pre-college science competition in the country. Every year about 1,600 high school seniors compete by submitting original science projects.